UGA police phone service interrupted

Telephone service to the University of Georgia Police Department was disrupted temporarily Monday - the fifth such disruption since June 17.

But the breaks have not affected 911 calls or the ability of police to respond to emergencies, said UGA Police Chief Jimmy Williamson.

"We have to work around it," Williamson said.

UGA officials sent out a campuswide e-mail Monday announcing that the police department's telephone system was experiencing technical problems with its main number.

Anyone trying to contact UGA Police should call 911, which was not affected, instead of the main number, according to the e-mail.

UGA officials have sent out at least five similar e-mails since June 17.

Telephone service in other parts of campus also has suffered outages, but officials singled out the police number because people call that line in emergencies, said Bert DeSimone, communications officer for UGA's Enterprise Information Technology Services.

Police and others inside UGA still could call out or call other numbers within the UGA system, but outside callers couldn't reach numbers inside the UGA system, DeSimone said.

UGA police have one phone line separate from the main university system; that line remained in service during the outages, Williamson said.

None of the breaks extended beyond about 30 minutes, DeSimone said.

No single factor accounts for every disruption, he said.

In a couple of instances, the problem was a failure in equipment that belongs to UGA's telephone service provider.

Another outage happened when a device called an uninterruptible power supply didn't turn on when electricity went out in a campus building that houses UGA telephone equipment, DeSimone said.

And aging equipment in UGA's core central telephone system caused other disruptions, he said.

For more than a year, workers have been replacing or upgrading older equipment, DeSimone said.